The Past Love Box | Eleonora Balsano
At an approximate age of forty-five the Past Love Box has left this world. Prematurely, remarked some witnesses. Fairly, according to its sole owner, Mrs Bella Wallace née Winship of Larchmont, NY.
The Box, as Mrs Wallace affectionately called it, first saw the light in a Paris apartment in the late 1980s. It used to be the color of gold, decorated with a jolly picture of the Belgian royal family.
Unpretentious and down-to-earth, The Box went unassumingly from carrying buttery shortbreads to holding pictures and love letters from teenage boys, clumsily recounting their summer camp adventures and stating that they missed B E L L A, in spaced out capital letters, as if that made her more alive.
When Miss Winship left her parents’ home to go to university, she almost left The Box behind. By then, the unsophisticated words in green ink on thin paper seemed childish and unsuitable to a shared flat, where prying eyes could deflower it at any time.
Yet The Box found its way in Miss Winship’s suitcase and stayed in her cupboard for the rest of its life. It grew heavier with more declarations of eternal love, now increasingly persuasive although probably not more truthful than a few years earlier. Men, and a few women, filled pages with their yearning for Miss Winship’s attention, and love. Some of them went on to break her heart. Nevertheless, The Box kept their love words in its belly, safe and unalterable like preserved jellyfish.
On Sundays, when an overwhelming feeling of loneliness took over the Saturday’s promise and excitement, The Box released its content to Miss Winship, who could then dwell in the past, reassure herself that she’d been loved.
When Miss Winship met Mr Henry Wallace of Houston, TX, The Box quietly retreated in one of the navy, unbreakable suitcases the blessed couple had received as a wedding gift. There, it gathered dust and rust in its hinges. The young people inside, their hesitant words and fresh handwritings, with the chubby As and the heart-dotted Is, became yellowed and wrinkled. They looked like discarded characters in an unsuccessful play. Mrs Wallace, busy with her radiant present, didn’t have time to waste over them anymore.
Her children started boxes of their own: Time Travel Boxes, Craft Boxes, Letters to Self Boxes.
When those new, young boxes left the Wallace residence to pursue new adventures in the outer world, Mrs Wallace took her box out for a drive. She pulled over near to a spectacular cliff, climbed on a rock and threw the Past Love Box in the ocean underneath. It opened half-way down, and its pictures and letters flew around it like hungry butterflies. On the way home, Mrs Wallace mourned her lifelong friend by reciting out loud the love poems she wouldn’t lay eyes on again.
Eleonora Balsano is a writer living in Brussels. Words in many lovely places such as Fictive Dream, Reflex Fiction, Retreat West and others. Eleonora is working on a novel and is represented by Zeitgeist agency. Tweets @norami.